4 minute read
GIFTED STUDENTS DESERVE MORE ATTENTION
PROFESSOR IN FOCUS
We fancy ourselves to be a knowledge economy, but gifted children and students rarely end up where they can fully develop their intellectual capacities. Kim Kiekens, a lecturer at Group T Campus, wants to change that. In 2019, she founded ‘Spring-Stof’, an organisation that provides a complementary learning path for cognitively gifted children aged 4 to 18. When will university follow?
On average, people have an IQ of 100. In 2% of the population, the figure is significantly higher, up to 130 and above. That doesn’t seem like much, but it does mean that Belgium alone has 200,000 gifted people. At KU Leuven, this would involve at least 280 students. “You rarely hear anything about this group and when they are in the news, it is often negative,” Kim notes. “Superintelligent people are still portrayed as if there is something wrong with them. They quickly get the name of being anti-social, maladjusted, or even arrogant.”
Diversity
As the mother of three gifted children, Kim knows what she is talking about. Before, she had noticed clever students who easily passed secondary school failing their engineering studies for seemingly inexplicable reasons. Once confronted with the phenomenon of giftedness herself, the pieces of the puzzle fell together. “Our education system and the whole society is tailored to those with average intelligence. For those below this level, remediation and extra support are provided. Those who score higher, on the other hand, receive little or no attention. The concept of diversity is thus given a very one-sided interpretation.”
What immediately struck Kim was how differently sporting top talent is treated. “Children with a talent for sports are encouraged to develop that further. The most promising can enter top sports schools. In higher education, top athletes enjoy all kinds of facilities, including their own status. Why don’t similar opportunities exist for top intellectuals?”
Speed
Finding it hard to get a hearing from mainstream education providers, Kim took the initiative herself and founded her own top talent initiative. In doing so, she had two goals in mind. “On the one hand, we offer learning programmes tailored to cognitively talented young people. On the other hand, we share our expertise through guest lectures, study days and work closely with regular schools and educational researchers. Therefore, what we do is based on the results of scientific research.”
Kim’s initiative caught on immediately. At Spring-Stof, 150 children and young people already follow their own pathway alongside regular school education. “What distinguishes gifted pupils from others is the speed with which they acquire knowledge,” Kim explains. “Our offer therefore consists of both subject acceleration and year acceleration. In the first case, it involves packages on maths, science, history, and languages. In the second case, it involves total packages. Each learning group has a maximum of six pupils per teacher so that we can best meet individual needs. We develop most of the teaching material ourselves, although we sometimes use examples and exercises from international meth- ods. In addition to knowledge acquisition, we also focus on perseverance, research skills, planning and problem-solving.”
Higher education
Soon, Kim also hopes to offer a Higher Education track. “We see several children who at 11 or 12 have already mastered the entire secondary school curriculum for several subjects and who would like to continue learning. They would benefit from a university-level offer in an age-appropriate context.”
Once in higher education, gifted students face problems all over again. “It may sound strange, but there are things these students have never learned,” Kim explains. “ We call these learning pitfalls. Planning is one of those, failure is another. These students have never had the chance to make mistakes and so have not learnt to deal with them. That’s why we identify learned fear of failure that causes them to underperform, lose heart and sometimes even drop out.”
Unlike primary and secondary schools, subject or year accelerations are not possible at Flemish universities. “The rigid structures lead to the cognitively strongest performing not at their full intellectual capacity or moving abroad,” Kim said. “Precious talent that our companies and our economy desperately need is thus underused or lost. That is why I advocate an expansion of diversity policies at universities that include attention to gifted students. And not just attention but opportunities, pathways, and sufficient flexibility to give excellence every chance to develop. Inspiring the outstanding is difficult to reconcile with an over-regularised environment.”
Yves Persoons
www.spring-stof.be
